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Fifty Years of Community-Building in Camden

Welcome to the on-line exhibit on community building in Camden, an evolving place for dialogue and commentary that grew out of a conference at Rutgers University Camden April 20, 2001.

Camden has changed dramatically in the past half century, as industrial plants have moved or shut down, homes have been abandoned, and crime has risen. Once a city of more than 120,000, Camden now counts less than 80,000 residents. New reports daily record difficulties in city government and in the schools. Yet even under such dire circumstances, families strive daily to achieve common American goals: to make a living, secure a safe and affordable home, to bring children up prepared to assume civic as well as personal responsibilities. How do today's Camden residents sustain communities in light of the daily burdens facing the city? What tools do they have to secure collective well-being when so many individuals are stressed? Have current residents had to re-invent tools to secure their neighborhood well-being?

Camden's current problems may seem unusual, but even when manufacturing jobs were readily available, Camden's workers were not wealthy. Before the advent of the welfare state, residents in different ethnic enclaves relied on one another in time of need. Informal as well as formal associations become the source of emotional as well as material assistance. Churches and synagogues offered places of recreation as well as worship. Sports events became the locus for community ritual and social exchange.

To a surprising degree, Camden's community functions continue, albeit in different form, well after the city's population shifted in race and ethnicity. At the April 20 conference, we heard from a number of past and current residents about the ways their communities operated over time. We include some of the excerpt from that exchange on this site. We provide here some visual evidence of the past as well as the present community functions. Most important of all, we invite you to extend this record, by recounting your experiences on this site and adding to the visual record by sharing your photographs of community activities. Past and current residents both share a passion for their city. The memories of those experience are quite different in detail, but they often converge in form. We hope this collective record of experiences in Camden will help inform and sustain a lager community of concerned area residents in their hopes to see Camden fully revitalized again.